Crushing on my Billionaire Best Friend - Jolie Day Page 0,1

was my best friend.

I’d pined over him for years, but none of that mattered. Sure, I was a little bitter at times, and I was hard on myself. I couldn’t be Miss Mary Sunshine all the time. I mean, seriously. Could any woman? Really? Since I was fourteen years old, I had watched everything fall into Oliver’s lap. The lucky bastard. An endless string of beautiful women (that was hard to watch), his lucrative career with his family’s company (that wasn’t hard to watch), and fun! Always nonstop fun. Or so it seemed. What I wouldn’t give to have his easy-going, “I don’t give a fuck” attitude and not worry about anything anymore. Trust me, I’d tried. It wasn’t easy to “not” give a fuck. I’d faced the truth a long time ago: I just wasn’t an easy-going person. Sigh. Especially when it came to him.

Well, anyway, while I attended our expensive New York prep school on scholarship, fighting to keep my GPA up, it’d been the Humphries family that funded the place. Which basically meant Oliver was a straight-A student whether he earned it or not. And while I was studying my ass off in undergrad, Oliver was partying his way around campus. He was bestowed the title of Chief Financial Officer of his family’s real estate company after graduating college (See? Told you he was a lucky bastard), and I continued working my ass off to earn my master’s.

And the rough road was far from over for me.

My next stop?

NYU’s prestigious PhD program.

Oliver’s next stop?

A trendy new club opening in Midtown Manhattan, apparently. With one of Cosmopolitan’s recent top-featured mannequins.

Like I said, absolutely nothing had changed since high school.

I blew out a long, steady breath, knowing I didn’t have time to get wrapped up in any of my “wannabe” deep-seated feelings of resentment toward Oliver. I failed miserably when trying to actually resent him. I mean, I loved the guy—actually loved him, and a lot. And honestly, it wasn’t about money and lifestyle differences. Truthfully, my main reason for secretly holding onto those off-the-wall feelings toward my best friend was that in all these years, he’d never once considered my potential to be anything more.

The only reason I could see that I’d been so quickly written off his list of prospective girlfriends was either the fact my ass wasn’t rail-thin skinny (which let’s face it—who gives a rat’s ass? Well, honestly, me—but only on bad days like today), or I’d been shoved directly into the friend zone—forever. Both sucked ass. Speaking of sucking ass: I never should have confessed my love for him. I did. Sigh. In a letter. That was more than ten years ago. Talk about the most embarrassing moment of my life. Let’s just say, I wished I’d never written it. Thankfully, we remained friends.

I’d come a long way since my frizzy-haired, baggy-clothed, four-eyed high school days. I’d also learned how to master the art of makeup and waxing my eyebrows. Yes, ladies, those brows—if they were anything like mine, they needed to be waxed in a bad way. Nobody liked caterpillar brows—it just took me longer than most to get my fashion sense in order. Not that it made any difference to Oliver.

Truth be told, sometimes I still wore glasses. Sometimes contacts irritated my eyes (Go me!) And baggy shirts (I loved my comfy, oversized, funny T-shirt “Okayest Girlfriend Ever” gift from Lisa. She loved funny gifts, and nobody could top her gags). And frizzy hair (unless I dumped all the anti-frizz I could get into it). I mean, who cared? I was at home, and I had nobody to impress. I was comfortable in my own skin, and I didn’t give a shit what other people thought. Okay, except Oliver, and he’d seen me at my absolute worst. But, I didn’t allow anybody’s opinion of me to define my self-worth. I’d learned that the hard way when I was a kid, struggling with my weight and self-image. Then I decided, “screw it!” I refused to live my life by other people’s standards or what a scale said. Scales were the devil, anyway.

I felt myself slipping back into the land of medicinal science, where nothing else existed except me and the tedious collection of things in front of me—be it algorithms, bacterial slides, or clinical trial results. Who needed nightclubs, cocktails, and entertainment when you had all of that in your life? All day, every day, often for twelve to sixteen hours a day.